Using Geographic Information Systems in Social ... - Heinemann

FM.fm Page i Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:36 PM

GIS in the Classroom Using Geographic Information Systems in Social Studies and Environmental Science

Marsha Alibrandi Foreword by Charlie Fitzpatrick

HEINEMANN Portsmouth, NH

FM.fm Page ii Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:36 PM

Heinemann A division of Reed Elsevier Inc. 361 Hanover Street Portsmouth, NH 03801–3912 www.heinemann.com Offices and agents throughout the world © 2003 by Marsha Alibrandi All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. The author and publisher wish to thank those who have generously given permission to reprint borrowed material: Figure 5–2: Copyright © 1949 by The Sanborn Company, The Sanborn Library, LLC. All rights reserved. Further reproduction prohibited without written permission from The Sanborn Library, LLC. ArcView, ArcVoyager Special Edition, ArcExplorer, ArcUSA, and ArcWorld are provided under license by ESRI. Copyright © 1992–1999 Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alibrandi, Marsha. GIS in the classroom : using geographic information systems in social studies and environmental science / Marsha Alibrandi ; foreword by Charlie Fitzpatrick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-325-00479-X (alk. paper) 1. Social sciences—Study and teaching—United States—Computer network resources. 2. Environmental sciences—Study and teaching—United States—Computer network resources. 3. Geographic information systems. I. Title. LB1584.7 .A45 2003 300'.285'467—dc21

Editor: Danny Miller Production: Vicki Kasabian Cover design: Judy Arisman Cover coordinator: Renée Le Verrier Typesetter: Argosy Manufacturing: Steve Bernier Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 07 06 05 04 03 VP 1 2 3 4 5

2002152324

FM.fm Page iii Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:36 PM

To the memories of Corinne Williams Alibrandi Artist, mother, and intensely practical woman, whose words “love is geography” must have sunk in! Like most mothers, she knew this book would happen before I did, and C. Frederick Alibrandi, WWII Navy veteran, CEO, and devoted family man. Also to two friends, Joe Ferguson and Ann Judge, whose legendary spirits and work in geographic education took them all over the world with teachers and students and, in the end, on September 11, 2001.

FM.fm Page v Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:36 PM

Contents

Foreword by Charlie Fitzpatrick Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi

vi

1 What’s GIS Done for Me Lately?

1

2 Is There Any Spatially Intelligent Life on This Planet? 3 Where Is GIS in Schools and in Social Studies?

44

4 The People Must Prove That There Is Water: An Environmental Community Service Project

63

5 Oral History, GIS, and the Web: Putting African American History on the Map

18

76

6 Building Community and Movin’ On Up in Motor City: Farr Tech 97 7 Interlude for a Critical Perspective: Are We Bridging the Digital Divide?

109

8 Getting Behind the Map: Critical Thinking and Community Service Learning in the Capital Area 9 Problem Solving in Canada 10 Conclusions and Implications References Resources

171 175

155 163

123

FM.fm Page vi Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:36 PM

Foreword

I

n the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the social studies classroom scene is a gem. Standing before class, the teacher, in his most soporific voice, “engages” the group through an endless string of “fill-in-the-blank” statements. The search for parroted facts (“. . . this would—anyone? raise or lower? anyone? anyone?—raise . . .”) goes unrewarded, despite ever simpler items. One by one, the students fall into a hypnotic stupor, to be rescued only by the bell. For many educators, this and other classic parodies of the school experience bear too much resemblance to situations we know about. The humor is wasted on us, because we know the tragedy of such classrooms. After completing my degree in geography, I started working on a teaching certificate, and we moved right away into practicum experiences. I had the fortune to see both ends of the teacher spectrum. My second practicum was in an urban core junior high school. “Social science?” this fifteen-year teacher asked, when I described my program. “We don’t do social science. We do social studies. Anyone who comes to class and can name the presidents gets a B for the year.” The class was what my program leader described as “a good nonexample.” Contrast these scenes with what happens in a number of classrooms across North America, where the teachers engage geographic information systems (GIS). The computer is a tool that promotes divergence, and skilled teachers know how to tap this wellspring of possibilities. With something like three-fourths of all data having a locational component, there is no lack of material for exploration. Faced with this double-barreled explosion of opportunities, and the dizzying growth of information, astute teachers in the social sciences are moving away from simple accumulation of facts. Instead, their students explore, question, sift, integrate, analyze, interpret, evaluate, and act. GIS is the tool to make the job manageable. Along the way, these students build their own conceptual framework with which to connect all the loose bits of information. And what, to the students in Ferris Bueller, would be just another random element in the midden of once-exposed facts, instead has a context into which it fits, thereby vi

FM.fm Page vii Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:36 PM

FOREWORD

• vii

becoming easier to understand, remember, and use to advantage. Constructing their own knowledge by wrestling with the information and questions, these students learn to treat information scientifically, not just in the chemistry class with beakers and compounds and procedures, but also in the geography, history, and other “social” classes. Such grappling with data is seldom a clean or simple process. Classes can cover vastly more material when teacher and textbook combine to present information. It is much more swift and simple—expedient—just to tell students that “policies in this community affect lives a hundred miles away.” But it is far more powerful to have students look at a map that integrates watersheds, stream flow, population density, land use, and transportation corridors, and have them hypothesize about the relationships, seen and unseen, and then study the data confirming the relationships. It requires almost no effort to present a numeric summary of the U.S. presidential election in 2000, and much more work to break the data down by state and county, overlaying time zone, local demographics, and historical trends. But students can acquire so much more integrated knowledge and transferable skill through exploration of the data than through simple parroting of the one or two “ultimate facts.” This book examines the stories of several teachers and their students. The communities, schools, grade levels, subjects, and teacher backgrounds vary. The common element is that the teachers expect their students to explore actively the world around them, questioning, integrating, analyzing, and evaluating every step of the way. They treat their subject as a science, their class as a lab, their students as investigators charged with making sense of vast volumes of disparate data, needing guidance and coaching more than answers and dictates. For these teachers, GIS is a “power tool” with which to emphasize their process. GIS is a tool that enhances and facilitates good instruction; it does not guarantee it, nor does it provide quality instruction. Just as a Stradivarius, a fine camera, a perfectly balanced fly rod, and the best cookware cannot solve all problems for a poor violinist, photographer, angler, or cook, GIS is a technology that can be employed well or poorly. Teachers and administrators who expect the afternoon arrival of GIS software to transform classes and methods by morning will be sorely disappointed. But GIS does make it easier for teachers to engage students actively in learning, and thus perhaps to help them do things differently or more powerfully. • With GIS, students who helped fit timber wolves with transmitters watched in amazement as GPS points transmitted by satellite showed the wolves traveling far and wide, through forest, farm, and suburb, across bridges, rivers, and highways. What are the implications of these protected creatures traveling so?

FM.fm Page viii Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:36 PM

viii •

FOREWORD

• With GIS, students have examined school district attendance zone boundaries, and explored the alternatives when a school is to be opened or closed. What are implications—for the many and the individual—of lines drawn here versus there? • With GIS, students have explored the school as a part of its community through time, examining the role it played in the lives its students and teachers led. In what ways have community values been reflected in, and in what way have they been changed by, the nature of the school? • With GIS, students are mapping invasive weeds, exploring their avenues for dispersal, modeling their impact on community resources. After sharing these data with state agencies and teaching other students to do the same, how have opinions about the value of a school and its students changed within the community? When teachers have access to tools that facilitate such exploration, and students are encouraged to construct their own knowledge, everyone benefits. When teachers—rarely the technical experts—learn new tools alongside the student, the young learners see powerful models of education as a lifelong process. When students engage GIS tools to examine data in one class, then discover the technology works equally well in another class, their skills compound and their knowledge framework grows more integrated. And as students create data and knowledge and present this to the community and the world, the school becomes more a part of its local and global community, instead of remaining an isolated place, apart from it. When teachers combine good practices with good resources, there’s no limit to where their students can go. Charlie Fitzpatrick K–12 Schools and Libraries Coordinator Environmental Systems Research Institute

FM.fm Page ix Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:36 PM

Acknowledgments

I

n fall 2001, while working on this book, the attacks of September 11 impacted this project in riveting ways. Two friends with the National Geographic Society’s Geography Education program, Joe Ferguson and Ann Judge, were hosting two teachers and six students from Washington, D.C., on a trip to a Sustainable Seas conference in California when their plane was hijacked and hit the Pentagon. Central figures in promoting Geographic Education in the U.S., these two had supported, inspired, and collaborated with a network of perhaps ten to fifteen thousand teachers and students, traveling with them across the U.S., to the Mediterranean, and opening them to a world of exploration and multicultural understanding. Charlie Fitzpatrick and I were among hundreds who attended the National Geographic Society’s memorial to Joe and Ann in Washington a week after the attacks. In some ways, remembering their brilliant lives and work was a comfort. In the aftermath, as we struggled to understand and to reconstruct our commitments to one another as a nation, we tried to find meaning. It dawned on me that I could contribute 1 percent for peace from my profit from the book. It’s far too little, but in this age of extreme corporate wealth and extreme poverty, at least it’s something—and we are all trying to find something we can do. The visits to the schools described in the following chapters were made possible through a faculty research grant from North Carolina State University. These visits were a joy; being part of these scenes of activity has been inspirational, and I can only hope that I have captured their essence. Lois Crowe assisted in the transcription of the audiotaped interviews. Those involved in GIS K–12 will recognize the work and words of these pioneering educators who each believe in the power of students to transform their communities for environmental and social health. These educators and partners, Dave Gorrill, Jaci Barton, Randy Raymond, Freda Brown, Yichuan Xie, Kathryn Keranen, Lance Hill, John Jones, Rex Taylor, John Nicolucci, and those teachers mentioned by name throughout the book, are the kinds of teachers who take risks but trust themselves and their students to solve problems together. This is ultimately the trust we ix

FM.fm Page x Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:36 PM

x •

ACK N OW L E D G M E N T S

must put into the hands of students in order for them to be prepared to meet future demands and the inevitable problems that will arise in their lifetimes. This, to me, is ultimately the purpose of social studies. These classrooms are distinctly different from content-based classrooms. Student and teacher roles are different. Students see teachers leading them and learning with them. Social studies educator Seth Kreisberg described this as “power-with.” All of these teachers trusted their students to speak with me in interviews about their work with GIS, and I am deeply grateful for that experience and their generosity in the spirit of learning and teaching. In each of these settings, the software being used was ArcView, from Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI). The role of ESRI (in particular, the work of Charlie Fitzpatrick, George Dailey, and Angela Lee, and, at ESRI Canada, Chris North and Erin D’Allessandro) has been central to integrating GIS in schools. There are other softwares mentioned in the book, but ESRI has taken the international lead in GIS K–12, and the network now extends to Europe, Asia, and Australia. Many thanks go to Dr. Cheryl Mason Bolick, formerly of the University of Virginia, for introducing me to the core group of social studies teacher educators involved in promoting technology in the social studies. Dr. Mason Bolick, a graduate of North Carolina State University, was instrumental in partnering several institutions in federal “PT3” grants that supported the integration of technology in social studies teacher education. These, through our local principal investigators, Dr. John Park and Dr. Hiller Spires, and MentorNet outreach coordinator, Dr. Lisa Grable, have helped teachers across North Carolina by developing workshops and online tools for technology integration. My colleagues on the Delany history project, Dr. Candy Beal and Dr. Anna Wilson, and the five teachers with whom we worked, Ann Thompson, Rita Hagevik, Betty Mackie, Ginny Owens, and Neville Sinclair, their 125 middle school students, and the alumni interviewed co-constructed a most memorable and meaningful learning experience and community project. Danny Miller, Bill Varner, and the helpful people at Heinemann have encouraged and tolerated the fits and starts of this project with grace. Special thanks go to Shannon White, developer of many of the CD activities. Shannon, Ann Thompson, Rita Hagevik, and Barbaree Duke have been co-constructors and co-instructors in the GIS in Education course. As co-educators, they’ve helped to create the new landscapes of learning—the new relationships and pedagogy—that make technology integration possible, bearable, and worth it! To my family: my brothers and their families, for their support throughout this process, my deepest gratitude. And to my partner, Andy, for support, cheer, and good sense even as he struggles with the unceasing demands of teaching and testing, thank you.

FM.fm Page xi Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:36 PM

Introduction

W

ho could have predicted even twenty-five years ago how life at the turn of the twenty-first century would look? As professionals involved in the teaching and interpretation of social studies, we find ourselves, like everyone else, just trying to make sense of—and survive— the phenomena surrounding us. If the moniker “the Information Age” sticks in historical perspective, how will social studies teachers have responded to the proliferation of information? Will we have adjusted our practices to fit the conditions? Have even those who held out at first come to use word processing and the Internet as regular means toward student learning? In this book, we try to reframe social studies for the new century to address conditions we see impacting adolescents, communities, and education itself—a modest proposal! In that context, we see an interdisciplinary technology, geographic information systems (GIS), as particularly useful. GIS is used daily in so many aspects of human activity that it will become one of those skill sets as basic as word processing is today. Looking historically at the uptake of computer use in the classroom, this transition is roughly comparable to the status of word processing integration in 1990. If you’ve pulled a travel map off of the Internet, you’ve used a GIS. You entered an address destination and a starting point—two points on a digital map related in a database of street address locations. Your travel map pops up with a little star at your destination point, you print it, and off you go (if you haven’t done this yet, go to ). The databased address information relates to the spatial representation through a coordinated geographic information system (GIS) that uses point references, lines, and polygons to represent areas on the ground. But the power in GIS is its ability to relate huge databases of information— to store, to locate, and, most important, to analyze information with spatial properties. Charlie, Shannon, and I have all taught GIS to both adolescents and adults. We’ve had adolescents assisting adults in this process. Technology changes the landscape of teaching to be more collaborative, since the knowledge is distributed—teachers have a better sense of what xi

FM.fm Page xii Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:36 PM

xii •

IN T RO DU C T I O N

types of questions to ask of the technology and students have greater facility with the buttons, the mouse, and possibly the Internet. If you’ve used technology in your classroom, you’re familiar with this phenomenon. Might as well get used to it—this is one of the changes that will probably stick, given adolescents’ developmentally appropriate inquisitiveness (more on that later in our discussion of spatial cognition). For now, let us invite you to take a look into some school projects that have integrated GIS to benefit both education and the community.

The GIS Connection and Companion CD Interspersed throughout the book, you’ll see icons for the GIS Connection (GISC) activities found on the companion CD located in the back sleeve of the book. We’ve designed these to make the GIS connection into your social studies class a more direct one. GIS educator Charlie Fitzpatrick of Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) developed and donated his ArcVoyager demonstration version GIS software for schools and libraries. ArcVoyager functions mirror most of the GIS product ArcView with the exception of saving, so once you’ve played with ArcVoyager and want to use that map again, it must be saved as a Print Screen. The GIS Connection activities will address how to manipulate ArcVoyager. We recommend playing with ArcVoyager for a few months and then suggest you consider the next step to ArcView. We provide steps toward that in the resources section (see Malone, Palmer, Voigt’s Mapping Our World: GIS Lessons for Educators).

Overview of the Book Chapter 1, What’s GIS Done for Me Lately?, introduces GIS and its current uses. We discuss social studies as a multidiscipline from which various social problems are addressed, offering that GIS is an important analytical tool for problem solving. We discuss the function of schools in communities, how we see that relationship changing, and the necessity of strengthening that relationship for adolescents to become active participants in the community. We discuss the historic setting of the generation “growing up digital” and the social implications and critical perspectives on technology implicit in the National Council for Social Studies’ theme “Science, Technology, and Society.” Chapter 2, Is There Any Spatially Intelligent Life on This Planet?, discusses spatial intelligence and cognition as central to learning in social studies. We then present examples of both spatial and temporal representation in GIS and its new uses in historic, archeological, and ecological studies, and touch upon the new field of environmental history as located in the evolution of

FM.fm Page xiii Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:36 PM

INT RO DU C T I O N

• xiii

intellectual history. We introduce ways students can analyze information across the multidiscipline of social studies and focus on the student as active participant in conducting social studies for community problem solving. Chapter 3, Where Is GIS in Schools and in Social Studies?, highlights GIS integration in social studies classes in selected projects from across the nation. I describe a visit to a high school classroom that seemed to have all of the perfect conditions for integrating GIS to suggest how the changing landscapes of learning can be better utilized when there is actual research to do and to coordinate through GIS and other technologies. I then introduce the schools and communities profiled in chapters 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9 in a preview to getting inside each school. While each of the following chapters has a different focus because of the uniqueness of its project or course, at each site, two teachers, six students, and two community partners were interviewed. The community partner interviews took me from a downtown high-rise in a major Canadian city to an office at the U.S. Geological Survey headquarters to a doorstep in the Midwest, streamside in New England, and to a middle school media center in the Southeast. Student interviews involved students in drawing representations of themselves in their communities, responding to questions, and meeting in moments between classes and sometimes during class. Teacher interviews ranged from kitchen tables to one school’s planetarium (not all that often in use), to conversations in the car with a handheld tape recorder that recorded every seam in the road, to shared office spaces, to borrowed back rooms in school libraries, to telephone interviews in the evening after school. The interviews were compelling, intriguing, moving, commiserating, funny, and utterly rewarding. The school chapters describe projects that utilized GIS to address community issues. Each of these schools was a site for a case study in learning and teaching with GIS. Each has a related GIS lesson application that describes GIS processes used to solve the problem. Each, it is important to note, had a partner relationship with ESRI through either ESRI/US or ESRI/ Canada. ESRI’s leadership in developing access and supporting GIS integration in schools has been unparalleled. Their commitment to GIS for everyone has led to the development of central websites, and , and activities; the first book on the topic, GIS in Schools (Audet and Ludwig 2000); and the International ESRI EdUC, an international educational user’s group conference held in San Diego . These resources are absolutely essential in integrating GIS in K–12 education. Chapter 4, The People Must Prove That There Is Water, presents a community service project from coastal New England in which students used

FM.fm Page xiv Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:36 PM

xiv •


GPS and conducted water quality testing along a source-to-sea river where pollution and reduced flow had impacted local shellfish beds. The school and community—at odds with one another at first—came to find mutual benefit from the collaborative project. Students collected data using GIS to map their findings over a four-year period and reported each year in two events; one was a local River Day event sponsored by their nonprofit organization partner and the other was a statewide conference for students and teachers involved in environmental community service. The GIS Connections are creating databases and GIS themes from historic information. Chapter 5, Oral History, GIS, and the Web: Putting African American History on the Map, describes an interdisciplinary oral history project in which middle school students interviewed African American adults who had attended their school in its segregated past. From the interviews, teachers and students developed a historic representation of cultural features of preand Civil Rights–era parts of their city. In the process, they learned that what is considered “data” is determined by the cultural perspectives of those who gather the data. The GIS Connections are oral histories and GIS, photos and digital archives, and hotlinking photos to maps. Chapter 6, Building Community and Movin’ On Up in Motor City, describes projects that address community needs—school districting, distribution routes for a food bank, and site location problems for childcare facilities. Community capacity building through a central business district organization and partnerships across school, community college, and state college benefited all of the partners. Students felt connected to this major city through their work. The GIS Connections are site selection: where do we locate the next daycare center? Chapter 7, Interlude for a Critical Perspective: Are We Bridging the Digital Divide?, addresses the social implications of GIS and technology in general. Maps are not truth; maps are representations. It is necessary to maintain this awareness as we use or construct maps. Particularly relevant to GIS is a discussion of data—whose data, who is included in the data, how the data are gathered, and building in students’ interpretive strategies for questioning data and representations. Finally, a section entitled “Community as Energy” illustrates why students’ energies must become integral if communities are to be sustainable—and how GIS can facilitate that. Chapter 8, Getting Behind the Map: Critical Thinking and Community Service in the Capital Area, describes a senior capstone double course designed for real-world problem solving through integrating technology. Students took a geology and GIS course combination, studying population growth and watershed issues using fieldwork and satellite imagery. With a U.S. Geological Survey GIS partner, students ground truthed satellite image data. They presented their findings at their county complex to a sophisti-

FM.fm Page xv Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:36 PM


• xv

cated audience outside the nation’s capital. The GIS Connection is satellite imagery, raster data, and ground truth. Chapter 9, Problem Solving in Canada, describes the work of coauthors of a GIS workbook developed for students in a geographics class in which students with extensive preparation in geography use GIS to address problems from transportation planning for the Olympics to mapping ethnic neighborhoods. The GIS Connection is on mapping ethnicity. Chapter 10, Conclusions and Implications, summarizes the unique features and common factors from the school case studies. From the research in these schools, we recap best practices and infrastructural conditions to support GIS integration. The Resources section is a guide to the burgeoning resources to support GIS in K–12 education, heavy on Internet resources, industries, and agencies that would likely partner with schools.

CHAPS.fm Page 44 Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:37 PM

3 Where Is GIS in Schools and in Social Studies?

Why Include GIS in Social Studies Classrooms? It is essential that we continue to teach concepts of geography in social studies. An understanding of spatial and cultural issues is central to geography and, it would appear, to our shared future. As we continue to populate this planet with unprecedented numbers of humans, we will face not fewer, but more conflicts over space, resources, distribution of resources, and power over resources. How will today’s students best be the problem solvers of the twentyfirst century? Is it in their (and our) best interests to consciously avoid the knowledge of spatial and geographic issues and problems? Because if we do not address these in social studies classrooms, we have, by default or deselection, decided not to prepare students for the world they will inherit, must understand, and must work together to construct. By including this tool of geographic representation, we create the possibility that today’s students will be prepared with layered understandings of space, history, culture, and environment, all essential to the survival of the species. Perhaps more imperative is the presentation of geographic understandings and GIS in a context of social studies and its themes applying critical perspectives and ethical practice for sustainable communities. To do anything less is to deny the future and the fact that there will be inherent social, geopolitical, and economic problems; to deny that technology cannot in and of itself solve everything; and to deny the shifting role of educators in that future. In some cases it may mean that teachers must make conscious choices in their students’ preparation. Are they preparing students for their futures or are they preparing them for a test? 44


WH E RE IS GI S I N S CHO O L S AN D I N S O C I AL S T U D I E S ?

• 45

Social studies teachers have always had to balance these issues within their practice. The inclusion of geography and/or GIS also means that many teachers will have to educate themselves. We hope that this book will be a bridge toward that shared future of problem solving and cultural and environmental understanding.

How Is GIS Currently Used in Conducting Social Studies? A great place to see how teachers and students are integrating GIS is through ESRI’s extensive schools and libraries website, . Arguably the single most-visited website by K–12 educators integrating GIS, the site is maintained, updated, and linked to support from ESRI’s schools and libraries team, Charlie Fitzpatrick, George Dailey, and Angela Lee. Among other resources found at the site are lessons using ArcView, at , and downloadable ArcVoyager software (graciously provided for you on the CD in the back of this book by agreement with ESRI). Put the book down and go exploring on the website. While you’re there, go to the ESRI home page at and look for online demos from the index on the left side of the page. This is a great site for students to begin building an understanding of what GIS can do. This is where we start with university students to discover some of the many utilities of GIS.

The GIS Connection In this section, I describe several Internet and teacher-developed projects that may be found on the CD. These can help connect GIS to your classroom. For a total immersion into conducting social studies with GIS, visit the Community Atlas Project at . With this project, a school can begin to develop a profile of its community using data available online from a variety of resources. As a first step, set a few technology-savvy students onto the community atlas project to begin developing a student base and an information base to which other investigations could connect. Featured on the website is Lynn Malone of Great Barrington, Rhode Island. Lynn began integrating GIS this way and has ongoing community GIS projects as part of her middle school geography classes. Introduced for 2002 is the international project at that invites participants from the global community to contribute projects to a central location. At ESRI’s 2001 ESRI EdUC (Educators’ User Conference), , Carl C. Addington presented a Civil War history project entitled “The Killer Angels: A GIS of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863” that


46 •

GIS IN THE CLASSROOM

traced battalion movements in the battles depicted in the film Gettysburg. Addington presented Gettysburg and GIS maps he developed to enhance his students’ understanding of the terrain and the locations of the battles, distributing a companion CD to the film. In a similar project, Christopher Harris, working with fifth-grade students, followed the trail of a particular regiment that hailed from the students’ home state of North Carolina. Developer Harris described his project, “Footsteps of Glory: Using GIS to Track the North Carolina 26th Regiment,” this way: I worked with fifth-grade students to locate Civil War battles in which the NC 26th played an important role. We then located these battles in a GIS map and used PowerPoint to create a “movie” of the troop movements. The troop statistics from the battles were used in math as we studied ratios and percentages. This project, the teacher told me, brought out more excitement and dedication to work than he has seen in many years. Students connected with the spatial representations offered by GIS, and were drawn into the stories that surfaced when we probed the documents and history of the regiment. We titled the project in honor of the men who advanced the furthest of all the soldiers in Pickett’s Charge while suffering great losses.

A short PowerPoint of Chris’ project is included on the companion CD to this book. In Chapter 5, I describe in greater detail an African American Civil Rights–era history project conducted in a middle school that included 125 middle school students, some who conducted oral history interviews, and some who developed GIS maps from geographic references (or “georeferences”) in the interviews and archival photos that depicted pre- and Civil Rights–era Raleigh. As students interviewed the alumni of their middle school, which had been a historically black high school, they learned about the history of their community in a new way and became the recorders of that history. This was a service to a community that might never have afforded the human power to conduct this type of project. Thus, the students became historians of the African American experience in Civil Rights–era Raleigh, literally putting that experience “on the map.” An extensive website illustrates many of the project’s products: . In a recent semester of our GIS in Education course, projects ranged from elementary- to graduate-level projects. Harris’ and the next three examples are based on the work of inservice teachers who participated in a GIS in Education course. Two of the elementary projects were investigations of local history.



• 47

Barbaree Ash Duke, in working with third-grade students, began from a local history book, Both Sides of the Tracks: A Profile of the Colored Community of Cary, NC (1996), by Ella Arrington Williams-Vinson, about the town of Cary, North Carolina. The Cary described is vastly different from the Cary of today, and Duke wanted to illustrate to her young students how the changes had occurred. She contacted Cary’s GIS department, where she was given digital base maps of the parts of town developed over the past century. As Duke read the book with her students, she displayed the maps, locating the school and other landmarks in the town. By switching on the street layer, students could find their own neighborhoods and evaluate in which periods various parts of town had developed. This can help to develop that layered historic understanding of their community and place over time, with themselves included in it. Another third-grade teacher, Cheryl Davis, took the idea of Barbaree’s project a step further; she was interested in the controversial school districting issue. As she began to investigate the process used in her county to locate new schools and designate their contributing geographic areas, she began to influence the county GIS office in how they were approaching the problem! Unable to complete that (hugely ambitious) project, she began instead to research designated historic features listed in a database. Again, Cheryl found incomplete data, but the list seemed promising—its points could be located on the county street map, so she began doing what’s known as a “windshield assessment” of the locations. Driving through her community, looking for the designated features, Cheryl located some historic sites—buildings, chapels, and cemeteries—that began to enrich her historical understanding of the community. She photographed these and hotlinked the photos to the designated sites on her digital map. As a community history project, linked directly to the North Carolina third-grade social studies curriculum, the project combined several of her own interests as it integrated an appropriate technology (see Figure 3–1). About her “Our School District’s History” project, National Board certified teacher Cheryl Davis says: Younger students may not have the computer skills to do GIS projects independently, but they are very capable of using GIS to enhance learning. Activities can be teacher-led, or a few students can be taught the necessary skills, and become group leaders for cooperative learning activities. Prior experience with various types of globes and maps is also helpful. Integrating GIS with social studies is a wonderful way to make map studies come alive providing opportunities to develop critical thinking skills. My GIS project focused on our own community—our school district. Students used the maps to compare how our school district has


48 •


Figure 3–1. Orange County Historical Sites



• 49

changed over time. They can use these maps to research historical sites close to our school. Hotlinked photos provide an historic record of the sites; students can take virtual field trips of the sites following the streets shown on the map. At first I had trouble finding local data, but connecting with a community GIS specialist was the key. After some legwork, I located some large paper maps, which the GIS office digitized. I got what I wanted, and so did they! This project can now be used with not just this year’s students but will be ready for future classes. After all, our community is constantly changing!

In an interdisciplinary middle school project, teacher Nancy Hook developed a “Techno Book Review” incorporating GIS. Nancy describes the project this way: This interdisciplinary project incorporates GIS mapping and is adaptable to a variety of content areas and learning styles. How does it work? Students begin by reading an age-appropriate book based on a journey. Students map the character’s journey, adding relevant math-related data. ArcView (GIS) software extends student learning through visually representing spatial relationships. Finally, students create GIS layouts with graphs and hotlinks, sharing their books with other students using PowerPoint. Reading Walkabout, one student mapped the downed plane crash and journey, made a map of Aboriginal culture, and graphed rainfall statistics important to the story.

An example of the “Techno Book Review” can be found on the companion CD. In the Watts area of Los Angeles, high school teacher Herschel Sarnoff has been working since 1998 to integrate GIS into social studies classes. Sarnoff has developed history-based GIS lessons hosted on ESRI’s ArcLessons website, . Sarnoff ’s “Census 1790: Slaves as Percent of U.S. Population in Each State” project is available on the Web at: . At that site, Herschel tells the story of his introduction to GIS and ways that he and his students have incorporated it into a variety of courses. A number of their studies are posted on the Web, and his work with students is described in greater depth in Chapter 7.

The Look of an Ideal Classroom for Conducting Social Studies To my delight and joy, I was asked by a former social studies methods student, now an incredibly resourceful and active teacher and coach, to come and do a GIS presentation in her high school elective geography class. What a


50 •


treat! Rebecca Bradford had designed what all of us would hope to create as a flexible and responsive learning and teaching environment. Her class was large—thirty students—and bear in mind that all had elected to be there. Happily it was free of required end-of-course testing, so there could be an atmosphere of learning for the fun of it, or the joy of it! The class enjoyed the following advantages: First, the course was held in a block schedule, so we could move from one type of activity to another without losing a lot of “time off task.” Second, there were three computers in the classroom; two desktops (one connected to the Internet) and one laptop on the teacher’s desk that could be used to project to the front of the room from a mobile cart. Third, the phone line allowed Rebecca telephone and Internet access. Fourth, adjacent through a side door in her classroom was a shared computer lab for which Rebecca was the responsible faculty member. This allowed us to move into the lab without passing through hallways, and students could search on websites I’d provided to find GIS resources such as online mapping, aerial and satellite imagery, and other GIS-related sources. Fifth, Rebecca borrowed an LCD projector that we could hook up to my laptop (though we could have used her school-purchased laptop). Sixth was a resource I think is fabulous, a dedicated student assistant, whom I asked to locate certain Web resources on GIS jobs and an animated version of continental drift. He was able, during my introductory session, to find and demonstrate the two sites. What a tremendous resource for teachers! And what an important opportunity for the students! Many schools now have programs of in-house teaching assistants—an absolutely essential idea, for the reasons I mentioned in Chapter 1. Here is a way that students can become agents and contributing members of the community as they learn to conduct social studies! Had the computer lab also had a networked projector, any of the students could have displayed their findings from the search to the rest of the class on a large screen. When we moved into the lab, I gave pairs of students a list of websites that offer GIS online (see the Resources section). They explored the sites and shared their explorations with the class. Rebecca had several student products displayed; there was evidence of lots of hands-on original student construction of different types—masks, weavings, relief maps, replicas of cultural artifacts. Rebecca mentioned some three different guest speakers who had visited the class over the course of the semester—facilitated by the telephone access, without a doubt. I should point out that Rebecca’s school, Fuquay-Varina High School in Wake County, North Carolina, isn’t a new school, but resources have been used wisely, and by volunteering to manage the computer lab, Rebecca has earned



• 51

access to it. She sought out the student assistants for her three block classes, she designed the activities that interested students enough to take her geography class and to pass on the word that it was a great elective. So the facilities are part of it, but certainly not all of it! Rebecca sees the world as her classroom and has garnered the necessary tools for putting that philosophy into practice!

GIS Inside the Schools and Outside in the Communities In Rebecca’s classroom, we saw how a student assistant was an integral player. Any instructor who’s trying to integrate technology knows from experience that students’ skills vary widely, but that usually there will be one or two students whose computer skills are an immense resource. If that teacher is at all resourceful, he or she will already have asked those students to assist in teaching not only other students, but also the teacher him- or herself, some of the tricks of the technology. The contribution of those students is immeasurable, and Harvard’s Christopher Dede has written about “technology-enabled learning environments” as places where there is what’s called distributed collaborative learning and teaching (2000). Okay, what does that mean? Well, it means that we must acknowledge that the workplaces in which our current students will work won’t resemble the environments of the past, where isolated workers pushed paper and typed out reports in a vacuum. Neither do our classrooms model the future landscapes of productivity in the postindustrial, postmodern world. While there is still paper being pushed, to be sure, much of it has been replaced by electronic transfers, messages, and files. One of the major differences is that one is no longer “virtually” isolated. Communications technologies have changed all that. (Who among us hasn’t cursed email at least a few times a month?) With every new email comes another request for service, another inquiry, another possibility. The electronic communications represent the “distributed” part of the educational jargon. But the collaborative components may be either actual or virtual. In projects I’ve visited and directed, I prefer that the collaborative part be in the actual domain. Collaboration with community partners, other teachers, or other students is a most effective way to engage the synergistic thinking required for conducting social studies. Experiencing the “Yeah, that’s cool!—and then we could . . .” synergy of learning together is a goal state for students’ minds. Current classrooms don’t reflect much of how we should prepare students to operate in their futures. Neglecting the distributed nature of information and collaboration that are becoming increasingly part of the workplace environment means that students are still learning in an obsolete model. While GIS in and of itself doesn’t change that, its nature as a software


52 •


used to synthesize and analyze Internet-borne information for local and regional problem solving makes it an important technology of choice for transforming classrooms, schools, and communities. We are also finding that integrating GIS expands the classroom to incorporate community technical assistance and establishes new horizons for participation by and among students, teachers, and their communities. If communities can be seen as energy, and students are seen as vital sources of that energy, how can schools be seen as conduits for that energy? Since working with GIS, our views of technology in education have changed in that technology should serve education, and education should serve the community. By this we mean not just in educating students, but in providing services directly to the community toward its and therefore the school’s sustainability. In reconceptualizing GIS in education, we are now back to recognizing the critical link of social studies with communities and GIS as an active link in that process. The nature of GIS technology literally helps facilitate collaborative relationships (see Figure 3–2). Our views on this have been reaffirmed by social and political events of this turn-of-the-century period.

How Do Secondary Students View Themselves in Their Communities? When we posed this question to a random group of high school students, we were sometimes shocked, often dismayed, and occasionally warmed by what we saw. In an unpublished study, we asked some 140 students to “draw a representation of yourself in your community” and developed some criteria for interpretation, drew some preliminary conclusions, and were left with more questions than answers. Less than a fifth of the students represented their worlds as focused on school. Many drew buildings, blocks, or neighborhoods. Others drew haunting images of lonely lives spent indoors, isolated from their communities. Others showed themselves in community service, with friends, or with family. Less than a fifth of the students represented themselves taking an active role in the community through community service (8 percent); work (8 percent); recycling (4 percent); removing trash and other chores (4 percent). After viewing these samples, I wanted to investigate how the same task by students learning with GIS might compare with those of the control group.

Students as Agents In Rebecca’s and Herschel’s classrooms, we saw students taking active roles in technology integration. As we look into the schools in chapters 4–9, we’ll be seeing fundamentally different roles taken by students. In these settings, we’ll



• 53

Figure 3–2. Student Representation: “What Community? I Don’t Have a Community”


54 •


see students as agents, working collaboratively both with one another and with their teachers to coconstruct their learning environments. This represents a shift in the social structure of the classroom. We will be seeing more of this in the participating schools.

The Participating Schools The schools I visited had been experimenting with GIS early on (meaning from 1994). Most of the projects have evolved or the teachers have moved on, retired, or have taken on new dimensions of furthering GIS in education. Only one of the ten has retired from GIS integration; most are exploring new applications. In these schools, students took very active roles, sharing decision making with the teachers and with one another. These settings were sociologically different from traditional social studies classrooms that aren’t engaged in original inquiry or research. The teachers in these schools speak in the following chapters about depending upon and trusting students to explore and manipulate the GIS software on their own; to co-instruct their peers and their teachers. The teachers described this as liberating to them and as essential to the integration of the technology. During the period these teachers were pioneering GIS use, the software was undergoing transition from a DOS-based application to a Windows-based format, adding mouse utility and greater facility. Since then, ArcVoyager, which appears on our companion CD, was developed by ESRI’s Charlie Fitzpatrick, a former geography teacher. Charlie essentially embodies the GIS-in-education movement, and now has two colleagues within ESRI who share the expanding demand for developments in GIS educational applications. Once the Internet became an integral force in education, as it already had in research and in GIS, ESRI’s School GIS website () became perhaps the single most important hub for GIS in education. If you haven’t visited it yet, put down this book and navigate to it! Come back to the stories of the schools once you’ve visited that site. Okay, now that you’re back, I want to introduce the five schools we’ll be visiting in the next five chapters. Students learning with GIS could not be randomly selected as too few schools had or have sufficiently developed programs using GIS to yield adequate random sampling. So few schools have enrollments of over fifty students per year in GIS courses that the students, teachers, and communities I describe must be viewed from this necessarily small sample. I have used ethnographic case study research as my method of inquiry. Pseudonyms have been used for each school, student, and teacher as permissions for research prescribed. Students were randomly selected from classes involved in GIS teaching and learning. In three of the situations, I



• 55

interviewed students in the classroom as class went on around us. This is indicative of the type of inquiry found in GIS classrooms: students were involved in projects; teachers gave introductory comments and directions, and then students worked, usually in teams, on specific projects using GIS as an analytical tool. None were traditional teacher-lecture-type classrooms. In the following pages, I briefly introduce five schools in which GIS was included in instruction or in a community project. I briefly describe the school and community context of the GIS teaching and learning, and touch upon the community relationships. All of these themes are expanded upon in the following chapters. After each of the interviews, I asked each student, “Would you please draw a representation of yourself in your community?” Selected representations appear in the introductions below.

Baymouth High School (Chapter 4) Our first school, which I call Baymouth, is located in a seaside community in Massachusetts. The project was an afterschool environmental community service project. Baymouth is the only public high school in a sixty-squaremile town of approximately fifty thousand, the historic county seat. Students met weekly after school to gather water quality data for an ongoing study of a small source-to-sea river that had suffered degradation from channeling, agricultural and municipal well withdrawals, encroaching development, and high densities of nesting waterfowl. Students worked at streamside, taking samples and conducting physical, chemical, and biological tests at four locations on the river in fall and spring. During winter, students built a database of their findings using the streamside locations as the “geocoded” points as links (or fields in the database) to existing GIS maps and database information from the town’s GIS department. This was a partnership project funded by a state community service organization for capacity building between school and local government, NPOs, and local businesses. Well-developed GIS information at the town and county levels supported the student-generated data. Two teachers in the science department, including one who had developed an instructional technology lab for student use, facilitated the project. Neither teacher had been trained in GIS use prior to the project, but both saw its value for environmental science. Both were Caucasian males. I have written about this project elsewhere (Alibrandi 1998). Students were responsible for presenting their findings, and they participated in a locally sponsored “River Day” event and in a statewide conference for environmental community service. The students were all Caucasian: four males and two females, and their grade level ranged from ninth and twelfth grades at the time.

New England town Southeast capital county

Major Midwestern city U.S. capital area Major Canadian city

Delany Middle: G/T magnet

Farr Tech: Magnet sci/tech HS

DaVinci High: Magnet sci/tech HS

Star School: Canadian private boys’ high school

Community Type

Baymouth: Local public high school

School/Type

Course or Project

Duration of GIS Use

Figure 3–3. School Sites and Program Characteristics

Municipal/ provincial

Geographics course

Capstone course and project

GIS course/project

Municipal planning/ resource recovery

• State EE coordinator • ESRI • Local GIS agent • University

3 years

4–5 years

• ESRI Canada • Statewide utility

• ESRI • USGS • NASA

Semester-long • Corporate sponsor course; GIS in • University use 3–4 years • ESRI

2 years

• Town government • Nonprofit land trust

Community Partner Type(s)

56 •

County/ satellite data

GIS course/ interdisciplinary project

State/ satellites

Local stream/ Environmental community 2 years watershed service project (17 mi., source-to-sea)

Geographic Focus





• 57

Delany Magnet Middle School (Chapter 5) Delany is a “magnet” middle school for “academically gifted and artistically talented” students in a southeastern capital city. The school is located in a historically black community, and the students participating in the GIS electives came from the student body at large. At Delany, the initial teacher team was a combination of a science teacher and an instructional technology teacher who decided to collaborate on developing a GIS elective. One teacher had participated in a one-week inservice teacher-training course in GIS and water quality. The teachers were Caucasian females. Three other teachers, all females—a social studies teacher, a language arts teacher, and another science teacher—joined the project. The students came from sixth to eighth grades, and those interviewed were one African American male, one African American female, one Caucasian male, one Caucasian female, and two males of Central Asian ethnicities. Most of the students interviewed had participated in more than one quarter of the elective course entitled “Satellites, Computers and Mapping” (Thompson and Hagevik 1999: ). The teachers involved had developed the GIS course as an elective, and found that students wanted to continue to develop GIS skills. The course has evolved with teacher and student interest into an ongoing offering. It should be noted that because the magnet school supports teachers to offer opportunities beyond the state-approved curriculum, avenues for innovation and experimentation exist there that teachers in other schools might never take.

Farr Tech (Chapter 6) Farr Tech, another magnet school for science and technology, located in a major city in the Midwest, draws students from the greater metropolitan area. The teacher is a highly respected innovator and GIS technician, and has reached out to community business and educational partners. The (Caucasian male) teacher had instituted GIS in the context of his science courses, and had been teaching with GIS for three years. The students interviewed were three African American males, two African American females, and one Caucasian female. The interviews took place during a Saturday class; a partnership project in which a local business representative, eager to train and hire young technology-proficient workers, was involved in collaborative GIS instruction with the teacher. It is important to note here that three of the five schools featured in the following chapters are magnet schools. The integration of this technology in classroom settings in the 1990s was far from a “plug and play” type


58 •


of application. Since the pioneering work of the teacher featured in Farr Tech, the software for GIS has become more accessible, simpler to operate, and more ubiquitous in both government and commercial settings. The students in the Saturday class came from tenth through twelfth grades, and were interviewed during the weekly three-hour session they attended voluntarily. The entire course would extend over a sixteen-week semester, meeting every Saturday morning. Most of the Saturday students were students of color. I interviewed four African American males, one African American female, and one Caucasian female. One Farr Tech student’s representation is presented in Figure 3–4.

Figure 3–4. Representation of “Yourself in Your Community” from Farr Tech



• 59

DaVinci High School for Science and Technology (Chapter 8) DaVinci is one of the premier magnet high schools for science and technology in the nation. Located near the nation’s capital, the county is home to the U.S. Geological Survey headquarters. If any school should pioneer GIS, DaVinci should, and has. Dana was one of the nation’s first teachers to introduce GIS to the high school curriculum. She has been working to integrate the technology for five years. During that time, the software applications have undergone phenomenal change, and significant work has gone into developing more accessible software applications to attract teachers and school libraries to include GIS as an instructional technology. Dana worked with a partner teacher, Hal, who conducts field studies in geology and hydrology. During my visit, which was year three for the teachers, Dana was feeling that this year had been the most successful. The course was a double-major “capstone” senior course designed to integrate science and technology in an original research problem. The community partner was a GIS specialist from the USGS who was interested in partnering to have students solve a real problem. Using satellite image data, the students were given somewhat random areas that corresponded to pixels of the satellite image of the county. Students visited and field checked the value assigned by the satellite imagery to the pixels that represented a square on the ground. This process is known as “ground truthing” the digital data. I visited the school toward year’s end, and students were scrambling to complete their components of an upcoming presentation at the county’s impressive auditorium. Students were compiling data, refining reports, and constructing PowerPoint presentations. Dana and Hal allowed some of the students to be interviewed even in this extremely busy time. Three weeks later, I was able to return to see their presentations, where very knowledgeable audience members quizzed them on their procedures, and students reported that, among their other findings of over fifty USGS gauging stations throughout the county’s river basins, only three had consistent data usable for their study. This the students reported in a county that houses many of the nation’s elected officials. The students were confident, competent, and responded with assurance and candor to the questions. They were soundly applauded, and conversations ensued after the presentation much as in a professional scientific meeting or hearing. Some of the presenters were among those I interviewed.


60 •


The Star School (Chapter 9) Innovative teachers Dan and Jack teach in a private boys’ school in a major Canadian city. Pleased to be able to visit any school in Canada, where geography is taught in equal amounts to history, in the British tradition, I found the teachers utterly willing to experiment, to allow me full access to their classroom, and to carry on with their lessons, their in-class discipline, and their outrageous senses of humor throughout my three-day visit. The “boys,” as all of the students are called, were dressed in varying degrees of uniform; green jackets and ties seemed to be the norm, but many “pushed the envelope” by forgoing the jackets, loosening collars and ties, or sporting bleached hair. The mood in the classroom was hectic and productive; there was an expectation of commitment to the tasks at hand, while strict codes of behavior seemed unnecessary. I sat in a corner of the classroom, meeting with individual students who took time out from their teammates (they were working in pairs on specific problems) to complete the drawing tasks and questions involved in this study. It was a refreshingly offhanded and friendly atmosphere; not stuffy in the least, but the teachers were quick to point out that “just because it’s a private school doesn’t mean that each boy is a genius—kids are kids.” To a man, each student described GIS as a tool for “problem solving.” They weren’t being coached to say this, but had apparently internalized the perspective. When I shared the students’ comments about problem solving with their teachers, the teachers were pleased to hear that that sense had come through so strongly in the boys’ own words. Three of the boys interviewed were white and three were Asian American. Located in a proudly multicultural city with major Asian groups, Star’s classes were diverse. Two of the Asian Americans were from subcontinental families and one was Japanese-American. The driveway and student parking lot at the day school are very active throughout the day, and while the campus is green and welcoming, the school, like most, is growing too fast for even its most recently built additions. Even the newest classrooms and laboratories were in full use throughout the day and after school. The GIS classroom was equipped with perhaps twenty computers, most of which were working. There was one printer and the room appeared as most computer classrooms do, but it was carpeted, so the noise level was somewhat dampened. Conversations carried on as students worked and teachers lent assistance, encouragement, cajolery, and authority as required.



• 61

The Schools in Summary Teachers who collaborated on developing GIS options most often taught science, instructional technology, or geography. The geography team was a Canadian pair. In Canada, geography is taught as a major subject throughout the K–12 curriculum. In all of the U.S. schools, at least one teacher was a science teacher. In the one middle school, a more interdisciplinary project took hold, and data that was gathered in language arts classes became data for the GIS application. In the middle school studied, all but a math teacher participated in the interdisciplinary project. Interdisciplinary projects between history, science, language arts, and technology classes can be coordinated using a combination of GIS and other applications such as those for word processing, databases or spreadsheets, PowerPoint, or webpages. Each teacher interviewed discussed the benefits of collaboration—perhaps the most important being the support needed during the steep learning curve of early engagement of GIS. Additional perspectives on application, data acquisition, and manipulation of the data were also shared in successful collaborations. As teachers and students learned more about how to use GIS technology, a synergistic effect of collaborative learning characterized the GIS classrooms. These teachers were not afraid to have students develop their own interests and inquiries. When those inquiries moved beyond the teachers’ current capabilities, the teachers engaged community partners, other teachers, or technical assistants to guide their learning. In each case, GIS use spread somewhat laterally across curricula and made new and more sophisticated projects possible. In the following five chapters, we get inside the schools that integrated GIS into various curricular applications. In each case, there was collaboration. In most cases, there was in-school collaboration and partnership with a community partner. In addition, in most cases, there was an actual field component as well as a virtual application. As we develop avenues for GIS use in classrooms, the integration of field and community work will greatly enhance the mutual benefits to schools and communities, and there is great potential for capacity building as a result of these collaborations. Each of the schools had a partnership relationship with ESRI, developer of one of the most popular GIS software packages. ESRI has been the industry leader in supporting GIS in schools. ESRI, ESRI Canada, and now ESRI Germany and ESRI Australia have established personnel, Web support, and products directed at K–12 teachers and are the sources of support,


62 •


research, and development in this new area of educational technology. By providing low-cost training and software to teachers, and by sponsoring the first GIS in Education conference in 2000, ESRI continues to lead the GIS-ineducation initiative nationally and internationally. Fitzpatrick had already worked with a national teacher network as a computer instructor with National Geographic Society (NGS)’s Summer Institutes between 1987 and 1993. NGS had invited cores of teachers from each state in the U.S. to participate, sending them back home to develop state geographic alliances to promote geographic education. From that sizable network of Charlie fans, a network of geographic educators became one of the target groups for GIS in education, but as you’ll see from the following chapters, teachers with unique interests and backgrounds have come to integrate GIS.